Testing blood sugar level for diabetes. Jeremy Hunt said public health would be a focus for the government.
Photograph: Trevor Smith/Alamy

Tackling obesity and diabetes is to become a major priority for the new Conservative government, Jeremy Hunt has said.

In his first speech since being reappointed as health secretary, Hunt said there would be a focus on public health.

He said: “I think it is a great scandal that one in five children leave primary school clinically obese and it is something that we cannot say that we accept. We absolutely need to do something about that.”

Hunt also outlined plans to focus on general practice which he labelled “one of the most demoralised parts of the NHS”. He added that in order for the NHS to progress, general practice needs to be empowered and issues of burnout addressed. He laid out plans to align what GPs do with the rest of the NHS, to improve the capacity of general practice and increase numbers of GPs.

Addressing healthcare leaders at the King’s Fund’s fifth annual leadership and management summit, Hunt said the government was committed to addressing the Five Year Forward View (pdf), the blueprint for the health service put together by the NHS England chief executive, Simon Stevens. He confirmed that the health service would receive the proposed £8bn a year, as outlined in the Conservative party’s election manifesto, but that this money was going to come from cuts to other government departments.

He added: “We need to now move on to another part of the Forward View which is the £22bn in productivity and efficiency savings and have a much more detailed discussion about that element. Our priority is to eliminate waste to make efficiency savings and improve quality at the same time.”

Hunt also outlined his own priorities that include improving access to cancer care and continuing to make progress on dementia. “I think the quality of dementia care is very variable,” he said. “We’ve got much better at diagnosing it but I’m still not confident that when people get a diagnosis, they then get the first-class care and support that they need.”

He said he would “continue [his] relentless journey to make [the UK’s] hospitals the safest in the world. We’ve made some extraordinary progress since that big shock of what happened at Mid Staffs. It would be a real tragedy if we took our foot off the pedal, because I think we have an opportunity to blaze a trail across the world about being global leaders when it comes to reducing avoidable harm and deaths. I’ll make sure that is a crown that we have as the NHS.”

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Hunt said he wished to carry on the “fantastic” work done by former health minister Norman Lamb around mental health and to make sure that Labour’s key proposal, health and social care integration, happens. He also confirmed that there would be no reorganisation of the health service.

He added that he thought it important to keep asking whether the right culture exists across the NHS. “There are still areas where we don’t get the culture right in the NHS,” he said. “There are still areas where we focus on targets rather than outcomes as the key metrics of whether the NHS is performing well … We need to have a broader measure of what success is in the NHS and we need to do some careful thinking about how we achieve that.”